1. Technical Field
The present invention is generally directed to an improved data processing system. More specifically, the present invention is directed to a method and apparatus for scaling inquiries in a network of communicating peers.
2. Description of Related Art
Peer-to-Peer communication in a computer network may take many different forms including media sharing, instant messaging, chat rooms, interactive communities, and the like. One form of interactive community is a “one-to-many” request-response type system in which individuals may ask many users simultaneously for an answer to a question and then receive responses in the form of one-to-one instant messaging, N-to-N chat rooms, or summaries in the form of a poll. That is, a user may generate a message and have that message broadcast to a large group of users.
A drawback to such “one-to-many” request-response type systems is that all active users may receive all queries, even those deemed “inappropriate” uses of the system or that can be answered by just one person or relatively few people. It can be seen that if the community of users is in the hundreds or thousands, as in most communities of this type, and each user may generate a message and broadcast it to each other user, the number of messages being exchanged can be quite numerous. Each such message may cause an interruption in the recipient user's use of his/her computing device, e.g., due to a pop-up window or the like. This may lead to frustration on the part of the user because the user will be inundated with messages, the majority of which may be of no interest to the user or may no longer be relevant due to responses the originator of the message received from other users. Thus, it would be beneficial to have a method and apparatus for scaling inquiries in a network of communicating peers in order to minimize the disruption and consequent frustration of the user.